Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

510 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
*' I need not tell you, however," says the cautious
publisher, "that this is a thing of which I cannot
speak with certainty, as so much depends upon the
circumstances of the moment. For unless a writer
happens to be in the humour for it, and can do the
article with his whole heart and soul, it is worth noth-
ing, and is abandoned." "A writer" here evidently
means Wilson, who very often found himself unable
to take up a subject which was suggested to him
" with his whole heart and soul," too much one would
say for any collection of Annuals. Mr Blackwood
ends his letter with an apology for not having
written, which is not caused, he says, by any
feeling of unfriendliness. " But you have been busy
with your own concerns as I have been with mine,
and have not had time to take that interest in
'Maga,' or to send me literary news, &c., as for-
merly, and therefore our correspondence has of course
slackened."
There is another letter in W. Blackwood's hand-
writing of the same date, addressed to Dr Gifford, the
editor of the ' Standard,'—then a comparatively new
paper, — which throws an amusing light upon the
subject to which Watts had devoted himself, and
shows that the aid of the newspapers upon which he
insisted so strongly was not to be had, at least in the
case of a London paper, without reciprocity. Gifford
was one of Maginn's men, one of the innumerable
Irishmen who led the literary brigade in London, and
it would seem (the letter is imperfect) that he had
attempted to insist upon conditions to which the
manager of ' Maga '
did not choose to conform.
Blackwood begins by saying that the word "grati-